The Green Chinese Boy from Africa

The racial non-binary vision of novelist Leila Sebbar

In my 20s, I lived in the 6th arrondissement of Paris for a couple of years. Daily, I walked to my job teaching English at a French business school located on the Rue Cambrai, not far from the Notre Dame. In my off hours, I enjoyed walking everywhere, taking in the sights or hopping onto the Metro to meet friends for dinner, where we argued about politics and drank wine late into the night.

Now and then on my walks, I passed a scene that happened in broad daylight in the streets of Paris: a young black or brown man was stopped and questioned by the cops. Sometimes the cops cuffed them, pushed them around a bit. More than once, I saw a man prone on the ground, hands cuffed behind his back, an officer’s boot shoving the man’s cheek into the pavement. When I stopped and stared a bit too long, or started thinking I should say something, the cop pointed away, “Allez vous.”

I looked to Parisians themselves for some cue as to how to react. What had the men done? And why did passersby seem not to notice or care as they popped past the scene into the tabac for un café and dashed out again, a copy of Le Monde tucked under one arm?

A few years later in graduate school, a wonderful professor, Michel Laronde, taught me about a group of novelists from the 1980s who had begun to give voice to the beur, a slang term for the French-born sons and daughters of immigrant North Africans who were stuck between a Maghrebian heritage they had never known and a French identity that for complex reasons they refused to claim. The beur aren’t citizens (French citizenship is not automatic at birth) but they aren’t immigrants, either. They are exiles within their own nation.

Likely, the young men I saw being stopped on the streets of Paris were beur.

Author, Leila Sebbar

In one of those novels, Le Chinois Vert D’Afrique, author Leila Sebbar tells the story of a homeless twelve-year-old named Mohammed, who hides from the authorities in a shack at the edge of a city park. To this day, much of the beur population work in Paris but live as second class citizens in the city’s troubled outskirts called banlieues where children grow up in “council estates” (government housing) amidst almost unbearable discrimination and its effects—poverty, unemployment, gangs, lack of transportation, and broken school systems.

In Sebbar’s novel, Momo, whose own family is fractured by conditions like these, takes to the streets. Part of his survival strategy is to befriend a cast of characters who represent an array of nationalities, ages and backgrounds. Momo, himself, is elusive about his origins. He has a French father, Algerian mother and Vietnamese grandparents, so his friends take to calling him the Green Chinese Boy from Africa. His friends don’t all know or like one another, but Momo can get along with anybody. His favorite pastime is trying to piece together through the photographs his friends share with him an understanding of France’s colonial wars.

Creative and resourceful as he is, Momo’s fragmentary knowledge is no match for France’s willful collective amnesia about Algeria. In the 21st century, the French are only just beginning to come to terms with decades of silence and historical erasure about the brutal 7-year war that ended 130 years of colonial rule in 1962. The result of such enduring repression is that the hard work of integrating an Arab population into French society has never been done. As Inesa Ulichina points out, not all Arabs are Algerian, but all black and brown people in France serve as potential “Algerian” scapegoats within a society that still tries to sustain a difference-flattening concept of “francité.” Nearly 30 years since the rise of beur writers like Sebbar, and the better part of a century since post-colonial immigration began, France still has a problem. “The awareness of its own growing pluralism and inability to accept it,” writes Ulichina, “has created an identity crisis.”

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After my time in abroad, I tried to stay connected to French news. It wasn’t uncommon to hear about unrest in the banlieues, and it brought to mind the incongruities I witnessed, of that idealized Paris I strolled through kept in place by a brutal, state-sanctioned underbelly that liked to peek out like a beer gut straining at the buttons of a finely made shirt. Then in 2005 came world headlines: two boys fleeing from the police in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois were electrocuted while hiding out in a substation. Across the nation, weeks of riots and uprisings ensued, with then-Minister of the Interior Sarkosy declaring martial law to quell the protests.

15-year-old Bouna Traore and 17-year-old Zyed Benna

Eventually, even that news faded. In 2015, the Charlie Hebdo shootings happened. Mosque closures and attempts to ban the wearing of hijabs have continued with regularity right up through 2022. Recently, a Chinese-American friend told of spending the night in an unmarked jail with no charges being filed against him, solely because he had wandered into the outskirts of Paris with an Arab-looking American friend who happened to look like a notorious drug kingpin from the Sarcelles. (He was released the next morning—not his friend.) Meanwhile, conditions for the French-born Arab population have remained largely unchanged.

And I never forgot about Momo.

Inspired by Sebbar’s depiction of a boy who resists the state and its determination to claim and control him, I began to study American writers like Sui Sin Far, Mourning Dove, Velina Vasu Houston, and Diana Chang, who were also of mixed race and ethnicity and who, like Momo, wrote about resisting race classification. I thought I could build an academic career on the hope of mixed race as the “impossible identity” philosopher Naomi Zack describes in her book American Mixed Race. I hoped Zack’s concept of “racelessness” (not the same as universalism or being racially “color-blind”) could help dismantle the rigidity of racial classification.

So, I had a field of study. The literature of mixed race was a thing. Mixed race people even had an informal Bill of Rights. And then early in my career as an assistant professor, about halfway through writing a book proposal about mixed race in academia with a colleague (who will never forgive me and I don’t blame her one bit) I decided that I wanted out. At the time, I couldn’t explain my reasoning, but a gut feeling gnawed at me.

Nowadays, the salience of race seems to have deepened profoundly for all of us. From #Black Lives Matter to white fragility to DEI initiatives to hate groups like Stormfront and Proud Boys matters of race factor into many aspects of life with vastly differing consequences and implications across culture. A profound reckoning with American racial history and the roots of the slave trade has been one undeniably positive result, as has awareness that race plays a factor in all measures that matter, like health, housing, voting, education, criminal justice, and the environment.

But that same reification has also resulted in racial gatekeeping—endless conflict over who can say what, who can be what, who gets to decide what and what it all means. When I think back to why I stopped short of making mixed race my scholarly or personal brand, it has to do with those costs. If mixed race is just another marketable, representable, critically available identity category whose territory needs to be articulated and defended, what is the gain?

We know that race mixture is increasingly common. In less than a generation most people on the planet will be brown, and race will no longer serve our human tendency to divide into “us” and “them.” Meanwhile, we’re gradually becoming aware of how the effects of climate change on a browning, drowning planet will eventually make migrants of us all. What of racial absolutism, when place, nation and race become unmoored? What theories of culture and identity shall serve the adrift?

The hope of the in-between is not a refuge, not an identity, not a place. Naomi Zack calls it racelessness; Sebbar termed it “permanent disequilibrium.” Imagine Momo buzzing around the edges of the park, now dashing past a copse of trees then appearing at the edges of your sight again, moving, running, always elusive. He neither discredits the categories that name us nor ever fully inhabits them. In the end, it’s not that the beur refuse francité but that they resist classification altogether. In Sebbar’s vision of race and cultural mixture, beur is not an identity at all. It’s a practice.

Gustave Caillebotte „Rue de Paris ; temps de pluie“ 1877